The college hosts both full-time and part-time students (there are currently about 400 enrolled) and offers a bachelor’s degree in theology, a diploma of theology and a certificate in church management and administration. There are courses also found in secular institutions — foreign languages, statistics, philosophy and sociology — as well as classes in theology, liturgy and other areas of religious studies.

Many of the students have been educated previously in government schools. “From first to twelfth grade, I went to government schools,” said Mulugetta Dabi, a fifth-year student in his final year at Holy Trinity. By the time he was in sixth grade, he knew he wanted to be a priest in his hometown of Nazret, so he came to Holy Trinity.

In contrast, Sisay Wgayehu came to Holy Trinity only after his attempts to enroll at secular universities, including an Australian college, failed. “But once I came here, I was happy. When Addis Ababa University [later] offered me a spot, I turned them down.”

When they graduate, most students scatter across the country, often serving parishes in small villages. A few stay on and teach at Holy Trinity. The new generation of students will not only enliven the church at home, but will also help forge ties abroad, Mr. Dabi said.

Read more about Ethiopians moving “Into the Future” in the November 2007 edition of ONE.

This image from 2014 shows carvings on a wall in the courtyard of the sanctury of Baal in the ancient oasis city of Palmyra. Reports indicate ISIS damaged part of these world-renowned ruins over the weekend. (photo: Joseph Eid/AFP/Getty Images)

Temple of Baal in Palmyra damaged by ISIS(The New York Times) Islamic State militants in Syria have damaged the Temple of Baal, one of the most important structures in the ancient city of Palmyra, their second attack on the world-renowned ruins in a week, according to local activists and residents...

Islamic-Christian summit in Lebanon postponed(Fides) The Islamic-Christian summit scheduled for today, Monday, 31 August, to be held at the Maronite patriarchal see in Bkerké, has been postponed until a later date. This was reported by Lebanese official agencies, adding that, however, even today meetings continued with political representatives and Christian members at the patriarchal see in Bkerké...

Martyred Syrian bishop beatified(Catholic Herald) Bishop Michael Melki, a Syrian Catholic cleric martyred during the Assyrian Genocide of 1915 for refusing to convert to Islam, has been beatified. The bishop was beheaded by the Ottomans during the Sayfo — putting to the sword” — of Assyrians in 1915, a tragedy in which at least 250,000 Syriac-speaking Christians were murdered, alongside one million Armenians...

Kiev protest blast wounds 100 police(BBC) One hundred policemen protecting Ukraine’s parliament were wounded, 10 seriously, after MPs gave initial backing to reforms for more autonomy in the rebel-held east, officials say. As police were pelted with fire crackers and petrol bombs, an explosion was heard in front of parliament...

Russia probes smashing of “Mephistopheles” figure(AFP) Russia has launched a probe after a century-old figure of Mephistopheles was ripped down in Saint Petersburg, with Orthodox activists claiming responsibility amid fears of an increasing intolerance in the country. Police said on Friday they had found smashed fragments of the figure in rubbish sacks after it disappeared from the facade of a historic building in the centre of the northwestern city on Monday...

Standing at the entrance of St. Thomas — a large neo-Gothic building — is a cheerful man. Children wave to him on their way into catechism classes. Men, in slacks and dress shirts, and women, some dressed no differently from American women and many others wearing silk, satin and chiffon saris, greet him with smiles and handshakes. “Good morning, Father. How are you?” they ask.

Father Jos Kandathikudy and the people greeting him made all the contributions that transformed the unused St. Valentine’s Roman Catholic Church into St. Thomas Church. The church was donated to the community by the Archbishop of New York, Edward Cardinal Egan.

In the eight years since his superiors in Kerala asked him to organize Syro-Malabar communities in the eastern U.S., Father Kandathikudy has established 21 missions. St. Thomas was founded as a parish last year and is the headquarters for Syro-Malabar Catholics in the New York area.

The Syro-Malabar Catholic Church is the largest Eastern Church in India with 3.75 million followers. The newly established St. Thomas Syro-Malabar Catholic Eparchy of Chicago, headed by Bishop Jacob Angadiath, shepherds some 113,000 Syro-Malabar Catholics in parishes, missions and schools in 12 states and the District of Columbia.
When Father Kandathikudy began his pastoral work in the United States, most of the Syro-Malabar Catholics he encountered “had no identity,” he said. “There was no one to tell them, ‘Keep up your identity.’ ”

In the video above, priests from Iraq and Syria describe what is happening in the Middle Eastas genocide. (video: Rome Reports)

The lives of Syrian refugees who fled(BBC) Hundreds of thousands of people seeking to escape war, persecution and poverty have crossed into Europe this year. The vast majority are fleeing the conflict in Syria, and under international law are classed as refugees. Since the conflict began more than four years ago, about eight million people — or 40% of the population — have had to leave their homes...

Estonia plans Russian “border fence”(BBC) Estonia says it wants to build a fence along its eastern border with Russia to boost security and protect the EU's passport-free Schengen zone. Construction on the fence, planned to be about 110km (70 miles) long and 2.5m (8ft) high, is set to start in 2018. It is expected to cost about €71m (£52m; $80m), according to reports. The plans come amid heightened tensions between Russia and the West over the Ukraine conflict. Europe is also struggling with an influx of migrants...

Martyred Syrian bishop hailed as a model of holiness(Vatican Radio) On Saturday, 29 August, the venerable Servant of God, Flavyānus Mikhayil Melkī is to be beatified. Melkī was an Eastern Catholic prelate of the Brothers of Saint Ephrem, who became the Syrian Catholic eparch of Gazarta — or what is Cizre in modern-day Turkey, and was was killed in Gazarta during the sayfo or “putting to the sword” of Syrians in 1915, after he refused to convert to Islam. In an exclusive interview with Vatican Radio, the Prefect of the Congregations for the Causes of Saints, Cardinal Angelo Amato, said that the soon-to-be Blessed Flavyā nus Mikhayil Melkī is a model of holiness for our time, in which once again the Christian communities of very ancient standing face the threat of extinction...

Gaza victims still displaced a year later(The Daily Telegraph) It is a year this week since the homes and lives of Beit Hanoun families were levelled in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that to this day sees more than 100,000 people in Gaza still displaced with no real homes or livelihood and many living in the rubble created during the intense seven-week war...

Coptic Christian jailed for handing out Bibles to Muslims(Christian Post) An Egyptian Christian who was arrested in early August for handing out Bibles to Muslims at a mall is likely to remain jailed indefinitely after a judge extended his sentence and charged him with blasphemy right before he was scheduled to be released...

Near Alexandria, the Sisters of the Incarnate Word care for orphaned or disadvantaged children from Egypt’s large Coptic Christian community. (photo: Sean Sprague)

Egyptian Christians — known as Copts, a derivative of the Greek word Aigyptios, meaning Egyptian — are proud of their ancient roots. They received the Gospel from St. Mark the Evangelist, who brought the faith to the city of Alexandria, second only to Rome in the ancient Mediterranean world. There, he died a martyr’s death around the year 67.

The evangelist extended his activity beyond the city’s prosperous Jewish community. He called for the city’s populace, mainly Copts and Greeks, to adopt “the way,” the early Christian description for discipleship in Jesus Christ.

Mark sowed the Christian seed on fertile ground. Centuries before the Arab advent in the eastern Mediterranean, and with it the rise of Islam, Egyptian Christianity blossomed. It provided the church with the philosophical foundation and theological vocabulary responsible for its explosive expansion in the Greco-Roman world, introduced monastic life and peopled the universal church with some of its greatest saints and scholars, including Pantaenus, Clement, Origen, Anthony, Macarius, Didymus, Athanasius, Arius, Cyril and Dioscorus.

The Coptic Catholic Church offers a wide variety of assistance to people with special needs, including those with addictions. (photo: Shawn Baldwin)

The Copts today form the largest Christian community in the Middle East. Embracing an estimated 10 percent of Egypt’s population of 88.5 million, the Copts belong to three groups. The majority belongs to the Coptic Orthodox Church. This church developed independently, breaking communion with the churches of Rome and Constantinople, after the Council of Chalcedon (451) attempted to solve the Christological clashes of the early church. Despite centuries of relative isolation and on-again off-again discrimination or persecution, the Coptic Orthodox Church is experiencing a revival.

Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, European and North American missionaries — Catholic and reformed — competed for influence among the Orthodox Copts, especially after their evangelical efforts among Muslims failed. The goals of these missionaries — to educate the largely illiterate laity, bolster the formation of the clergy and work for the reunion of the churches — were well intended. But their efforts splintered the Coptic Orthodox Church, eventually forming Coptic Catholic and Coptic Evangelical communities.

In the first decades after Vatican II, the Coptic Catholic Church grew considerably. Much of this growth may be attributed to the many social service activities of the Coptic and Roman (Latin-rite) Catholic churches. These include schools (more than 100 parishes sponsor primary and secondary schools), orphanages, clinics and medical dispensaries. Most of these institutions are located in the poorest and remotest villages of the Nile Valley, which remains the center of Coptic Catholic life.

And while for decades relations between the Coptic Orthodox and Coptic Catholic churches had been frosty, the rise of militant Islam and its violent targeting of all Christians has now united all Copts, highlighting what they hold in common: their faith in Christ.

Click here for more on the Coptic Catholic Church from the pages of ONE magazine.

I must admit that I had certain preconceptions and received images that crossed my mind as I passed over the threshold of the Holy Family Orphanage in Ain Kawa, Erbil, a recently-opened home for children in need run by the Dominican Sisters of Saint Catherine of Siena to cater to the needs of Christians displaced by ISIS last August.

In the village I grew up in in the Irish midlands, there was a house known as “the orphanage” where kids from various backgrounds were taken care of by a mixture of nuns and state-employed social workers.

The children in this home were of various ages and so were in various classes of the village’s primary and high schools. They were cloaked in a sort of childhood mystery. Who are they really? Who are their real parents? Do they really feel like brothers and sisters? What is it like to have so many “parents?” There was also a sort of sadness, I remember, that we projected on them: a supposition that to be brought up by anyone but your biological parents can be nothing but a tragedy.

So this was the sort of vague, unprocessed baggage that brought with me as I crossed the threshold of the orphanage in Ain Kawa But from that moment, I was constantly surprised and enlightened. The Erbil orphanage reminded me not of the orphanage in my long-ago childhood village but rather it reminded me of my own childhood home and upbringing. Again and again.

The children in the orphanage: Sally (20), Rita (16), Mariam (13) and Thikra (10) had an age-spread not unlike my own family’s. And while my family consists of six siblings and theirs of four, I could immediately relate to the dynamics among the children: it is recognizable to anyone from a big family: alliances exist between various siblings, chores are shared out and one helps or hinders the other, there is a chain of surrogate care from the youngest to the eldest where gaps in over-stretched parental care are compensated for in an organic and spontaneous way.

That said, while I was struck by all the similarities between my childhood and those of the girls at the Holy Family Orphanage in Ain Kawa, it became clear during my interviews that there were some deep, indelible facts in their lives that make it such that I could never know their experience fully. Only one of the four girls is a “true orphan,” in that both of her parents have passed away. All the rest of the girls still have one parent alive, for example or are from broken homes or from families who are incapable of minding them and so were placed in the care of the nuns. That is to say that these girls once knew what it was to have biological family and to belong to a family bound by blood and not by various family misfortunes. The parallels, I eventually realized, only go so far.

The displacement of the Christians of the Nineveh Plain by ISIS in August 2014 constituted a second displacement for these girls: the first being the one from their biological families. That said, the displaced girls of this orphanage have come to find themselves in perhaps the best possible circumstance of refuge. While other families are reduced to sharing rooms with other families, while domestic problems flourish across the displaced community, while children exhibit behaviors concurrent with symptoms of trauma, the girls of the Holy Family Orphanage in Ain Kawa have found themselves consistently swaddled in the love and comfort of the two nuns who take direct care of them and of the larger family of some 40 Dominican Sisters in the convent just at the end of their street.

Read more in“Grace”from the Summer 2015 edition of ONE. And check out this profile of the Holy Family Orphanage in the same issue.

To support the Dominican Sisters and their work with displaced families in Iraq, please visit our giving page.

Oseni Khalajian, a pensioner living in Eshtia, belongs to a community of Armenian Catholics descended from Armenians who fled to Georgia to escape the Turkish mass murder. Learn more about the the efforts of Armenians Catholics to retain identity and faith in “Staying Power” from the Autumn 2013 edition of ONE. (photo: Molly Corso)

Ukrainian scouts patrol a neutral zone to survey the position of pro-Russian rebels in the Lugansk region on 27 August. (photo: Anatolii Stepanov/AFP/Getty Images)

Seven Ukrainian servicemen killed, 13 wounded(Reuters) Seven Ukrainian servicemen have been killed and 13 wounded in fighting with pro-Russian separatists in the past 24 hours, military spokesman Oleksander Motuzyanyk said on Thursday. The casualties were the highest daily losses for the Ukrainian army since mid-July, as violence continues to test a six-month-old ceasefire deal.

Iraqi archbishop: Plights of Christians has challenged his faith(CNS) Chaldean Catholic Archbishop Bashar Warda of Erbil, Iraq, placed his face in his hands when asked how his faith has been challenged and changed in the crisis he has helped manage over the past year. He said he has outwardly encouraged the Christians whom he welcomed to Irbil when they fled Islamic State, but within his heart he would frequently “quarrel with God.” “I don’t understand what he is doing when I look at what has happened in the region,” Archbishop Warda said. “I quarrel with him every day...”

UN: growing need for food aid in Ethiopia(The Guardian) The number of Ethiopians who will need food aid by the end of this year has surged by more than 1.5 million from earlier estimates, according to United Nations agencies. After failed rains, some 4.5m people are now projected to require assistance, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha), the World Food Programme and the UN children’s agency, Unicef, said. This is an increase of 55% on initial projections of 2.9 million, and means donors must urgently provide an extra $230m to meet these needs...

Dozens of refugees found dead in truck in Austria(Reuters) As many as 50 refugees were found dead in a parked truck in Austria near the Hungarian border on Thursday, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the discovery had shaken European leaders discussing the migrant crisis at a Balkans summit. Police made the grisly discovery in the 7.5-tonne truck stopped on the A4 motorway near the town of Parndorf, apparently since Wednesday, Hans Peter Doskozil, police chief in the province of Burgenland, told a news conference...

A Jewish perspective on “Nostra Aetate” 50 years later(Vatican Radio) Susannah Heschel is an American author and professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College in the United States. She’s also the daughter of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who played an influential role in the drawing up of ‘Nostra Aetate.’ At a recent conference, organised by theEcclesiological Investigations network at Georgetown University, Philippa Hitchen talked to Susannah about her father’s role and about the importance of that document, half a century on...

On 20 August, Israeli heavy equipment loads an olive tree after it was uprooted to make way for the controversial separation barrier in the Cremisan Valley in Beit Jala, West Bank.(photo: CNS photo/Debbie Hill)

The latest developments in the Cremisan Valley — with Israel moving forward with construction of a controversial barrier that will divide the region — has prompted a response from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (U.S.C.C.B.).

As Chairman of the Committee on International Justice and Peace of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, I write regarding the injustice being perpetrated in the Cremisan Valley near Bethlehem in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. My predecessor as Chairman called this situation to your attention earlier. A recent statement of the Latin Patriarchate encapsulates our concerns:

“On Monday morning, 17 August, Israeli bulldozers arrived unannounced on private properties in Beir Ona, near the Cremisan Valley, to resume construction of the Separation Wall. The residents of the area were surprised and felt the pain of the loss of about 50 of their centuries-old olive trees that were uprooted.

The Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem strongly condemns this Israeli conducted operation, which is without regard to the rights of the families of the valley; the rights that these same families have bravely tried to defend before the law over the past decade. We join with the sorrow and frustration of these oppressed families, and we strongly condemn the injustice done to them.

The construction of the Separation Wall and the confiscation of lands of the local families are threats and insults to peace. We call on the Israeli authorities to await the decision on the petition submitted by the families of the Valley to the Supreme Court of Israel a few days ago and to stop the work that has been started.

We urge you to press Israeli authorities to stop the work on the Separation Wall whose route is confiscating the private lands of Palestinian families in the West Bank. Such actions undermine the cause of peace and impair the possibility of a two-state solution.

A bougainvillea grows through the open window of the Good Shepherd Sisters’ convent in Suez, burned by rioters in 2013. To learn more about efforts to rebuild in Egypt, read Out of the Ashes in the Spring 2015 edition of ONE. (photo: David Degner)